Do facts matter?

Readers have probably figured out that I love historical facts.  I have since I was about 8, and I often think of my brain as a vast, multi-dimensional spreadsheet of information.  And when I read or hear something, my brain automatically searches the spreadsheet to see if it checks out, and if it doesn't, I usually say so.   I'm going through this cycle more and more lately, particularly reading what used to be my favorite publications, such as The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.  The younger contributors who have learned any  history seem to have learned a highly ideological version, and they haven't been trained to check facts.  They also have new ideas of what is important and what isn't.

The current issue of The New York Review features a review of a long new biography, Harry Bridges, Labor Radical, Labor Legend, by Robert W. Cherny.  The author of the review is a New Yorker Staffer named E. Tammy Kim, who writes a lot about current labor issues.  She immediately announces that the biography is too long for the general reader--which is a remark that I don't think any NYR reviewer would have made thirty years or so ago, when the journal had a higher opinion of its readership.  Bridges was born in Australia in 1901 and came to the United States in 1922, where he became involved in union activity with the International Longshoreman's Association.  After helping lead some critical strikes, he split from that group and formed his own International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which affiliated in the 1930s with John L. Lewis's new CIO.  He was at the very least quite sympathetic to Communism, like many other CIO organizers and officials--although not, as we shall see, Lewis himself, or the anti-Communist Reuther brothers who founded the United Auto Workers. Because he never became a US citizen, the government tried but failed several times to deport him based partly on his political views.  One such attempt occurred in the late spring of 1941, when Bridges, like other pro-Communist labor leaders, was opposing US attempts to aid Britain.  Some of these leaders, as I detailed in No End Save Victory, were organizing strikes in key plants to stop production that would aid the British, because Stalin at that time had been effectively an ally of Hitler's since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. I have now found (see below) that Bridges supported one of those strikes in California.  At one point in the review Kim notes the accusation that Bridges was in fact a Communist.  Here are the key paragraphs, reproduced for non-commercial use only.

"For decades Bridges’s alleged communism was a sensitive topic for the ILWU. If he was, indeed, a party member, hadn’t he put the union at risk and unfairly drawn on its financial and political capital for his repeated defense? Was it red-baiting even to ask the question? Cherny wants to provide a definitive answer. He reviews the evidence from Bridges’s trials, supplemented with new information from Russian archives. What he finds is inconclusive: Bridges probably wasn’t a party member, though he can’t be sure.

"It feels like much ado about (almost) nothing, in 2023, when younger unionists attach little stigma to the Communist label. Red-baiting still happens, of course, and radicals are often sidelined, or worse, in more traditional quarters of the labor movement. (Immigrants still must repudiate communism to stay in the US.) But Bernie Sanders–style socialism has helped to normalize various leftisms, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Young Communists League have applied lessons from the 1930s to recent campaigns. After the Amazon Labor Union formed the first-ever union at an Amazon warehouse in the US, on Staten Island, organizer Justine Medina wrote in Labor Notes that the workers had studied Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry, an old how-to pamphlet by William Z. Foster, a general secretary of the Communist Party USA.

"What might Bridges’s association with Communists, and the Soviet cause, reveal about labor and politics? He was a committed leftist, but never thought that the ILWU should be above or detached from electioneering. He once said of the IWW, “There comes a time that you can go a little too far with direct action. The IWW philosophy was never to sign an agreement, for example; never to arbitrate; never to mediate; never to consolidate.” Bridges was a New Deal loyalist and a confidant of Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s formidable secretary of labor and the first woman to serve as a member of the cabinet. (Perkins faced enormous pressure to deport Bridges; according to Cherny, he told her “to do what was necessary to save herself politically.”) Members of the ILWU voted down the line for Democrats.

"The signing in 1939 of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany, led the Communist Party to oppose US involvement in the war—to the shock of many antifascists. Bridges adopted this position, causing splits within the ILWU and the rest of the Communist-heavy CIO. After Roosevelt died, Bridges and the ILWU executive board fell out with the Democratic Party. They opposed the Marshall Plan, which the Communist Party derided as “American capitalists’ effort to control the economies of Europe,” Cherny writes. When the ILWU backed Henry Wallace, an idealistic but hopeless third-party candidate, over Truman in the 1948 election, the CIO expelled the union."

Now non-Communist leftists of varying stripes did, of course, agree with Communists about a great many issues at times in the 1930s and 1940s, especially during the Popular Front period of 1936-39. But what distinguished the Communist Party was its status as an arm of the Soviet Communist Party, to which it deferred on all important questions.  The question of whether Bridges actually belonged is important, but equally important, to me, is whether he followed Moscow's line on critical issues.  And I had learned long ago and confirmed while writing No End Save Victory that there was a simple test from the 1939-41 period that could tell you whether a person was a Moscow adherent or a party member or not.  It was not only the Communists, I found, who opposed aid to Britain in 1939-41 on ideological grounds. John L. Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers and of the CIO, also opposed anything that would get the US into the war because he believed that wars never served the interests of the working class. The real litmus test came in June and July 1941, after Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the USSR on June 22.  Some Communists, like Lee Pressman, the CIO's general counsel (who eventually admitted party membership before a congressional committee), immediately reversed themselves and began advocating for helping Hitler's enemies and speeding preparation for war.  John L. Lewis, on the other hand, proved that he was not a Communist by continuing to oppose intervention.  So I immediately wondered how Bridges had reacted to the German attack on the USSR.  A quick proquest historical newspapers search told me all I needed to know.

The labor movement in recent decades has shrunk almost to invisibility in the United States, but my search results showed that Bridges was one of many labor leaders who had become national figures in the 1930s and 1940s, well known to any newspaper reader. As it turned out, his deportation hearing--at which numerous witnesses said that he was a Communist--had adjourned in mid-June 1941, with the report of the immigration inspector who had presided over the hearing expected in August. On June 25, just three days after the German attack on the Soviet Union, Bridges told newsmen that he, like the CIO leadership, still opposed "Participation in foreign wars, and no overt act that might entange us in participation overseas."  But on July 10, speaking to a convention of the National Maritime Union, Bridges announced that he favored "full material aid to the foes of Hitler."  "We are not with the ruling class and Tory class of England," he said. "We are with the masses of the people of England who are taking the brunt of the bombing; Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, the lands that border the Mediterranean and India. We hope they will attain a measure of freedom so they can join with the greatest anti-fascist power in Europe, the Soviet Union, to smash Hitlerism."  

The immigration judge recommended Bridges's deportation, and on October 4 Bridges declared at a state CIO convention, "We will follow and support hte President in the all-out program of aid to defeat fascism."  Twice the federal government ordered his deportation--the first time in 1942--but the Supreme Court in 1945, and then in 1955, overruled deportation orders.  Meanwhile, Bridges' opposition to the Marshall Plan reflected the postwar Communist line, and Henry Wallace's Progressive Party was controlled by American Communists, as even Wallace himself eventually admitted.

Kim may not realize it, but her position grew directly out of late 1960s campus radicalism, which rejected every aspect of American liberalism from the New Deal through the Great Society, drew its inspiration from leftists from outside the mainstream, and refused to take the threat of Communism seriously.  While certainly today's union organizers, to whom I wish every success, might learn something from communist organizing tactics, they will not advance their cause by pledging allegiance either overtly or covertly to a hostile foreign power. Even the CIO, by the late 1940s, was eliminating communists from its leadership because their presence did more harm than good.  I regret that she did not simply argue that Bridges did plenty of good for his membership despite his ideological allegiance to a foreign totalitarian power--rather than insist either that he did not have that allegiance, or that it makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.  It did, and at the time, nearly everyone knew it.